Minutes of the February 18, 1999 Meeting
Present: Brother Paul Chervenie, Anne Ciliberti, John Cohn, Judy Cohn, John Gaboury, Marianne Gaunt, Pamela Price, Barbara Simpson, Richard Sweeney.
1. John Gaboury reported on several efforts to contain costs in the coming year. These include negotiating directly with vendors for database renewals rather than going through OCLC for year two, targeting an increase of no more than 7% and using carry over funds from the current fiscal year.
2. John also noted that other initiatives are being explored for additional funding in the coming year: statewide database contracts are being discussed with several vendors, discussions with staff from the State Library may lead to a new statewide funding proposal and strategies for a VALE-only proposal to legislators are being explored.
3. The need to keep institutional presidents appraised of VALE initiatives was discussed and it was suggested that a memo be developed from the VALE Steering Committee to the Presidents outlining the VALE funding proposal. Marianne Gaunt agreed to ask her public relations staff member to develop such a communication. Pamela Price will use this document as a basis for discussions with the two directors of libraries which chose not to join VALE this year. John Gaboury will be reporting on the VALE at the next Presidents' Council meeting as well.
4. Marianne Gaunt proposed that for planning and budgeting purposes the group agree that institutions should be asked to maintain their present VALE database commitments next year. She explained that this commitment for another year to the "core" databases would simplify the negotiations with vendors and the work needed to investigate additional electronic resources. The group discussed the proposal at length and the following views were expressed: the need for usage statistics in making renewal decisions, the problem of finding "additional" funding outside a library's budget for VALE, the value of capitalizing in year two on the training and support developed for this year and the political need to keep the group intact as VALE seeks to establish a permanent presence.
5. The possibility of adding to VALE's future agenda the development of a statewide contract for document delivery services was discussed and agreed upon.
6. Anne Ciliberti distributed a list of the electronic resources being explored with the Regional cooperatives as well as for VALE alone. In discussing the role of the Electronic Resources Sub Committee, Marianne suggested that they be asked to evaluate the candidates. Other suggestions were that they prepare a template for others to use as well in evaluating the products and that they poll the membership for their priorities in selecting new resources. Marianne will discuss these ideas with Judith Lin Hunt, chair of that committee.
7. On the technical side, Marianne reported that Dave Hoover has been quite successful in fine-tuning the interface according to recommendations and requests from the Interface group. He is waiting to receive the first UMI updates to be certain they load before introducing the new interface to the public.
8. Anne clarified that she will begin working with Dave Hoover to set up the remote access passwords and that she hopes to have this in place by the March 4 membership meeting.
9. In discussing item for the membership meeting agenda, it was suggested that a legislative support tip sheet be developed and distributed in order to maximize the library contacts with legislators.
10. Marianne reported that a group of her staff are exploring various electronic journal options and packages and that this information may be useful to other research-oriented VALE members who may then create a sub-group for negotiations with vendors. Marianne will try to set up some demos from the vendors.
11. The group agreed to meet again on March 8 at 2 pm at Rutgers.
Minutes prepared by Anne Ciliberti
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